The House of Breathing Read online

  It was not until early this year that I made a discovery: I discovered the existence of a hidden stack of audio-tapes. Without our knowledge mother had furtively recorded hours and hours of Rose’s monologues in order to use them, eventually, as evidence in her committal. I waited until my mother had left the house, seized the tapes, all labelled ‘Rose’, and as though somehow releasing her imprisoned spirit, played each right through, from beginning to end. With a tight pang of misery I heard my sister’s lovely voice, floating now disembodied and faceless through the years.

  It emerges finished and unfinished. It is nothing human. The body it wears is illfitting and discoloured, the face ancient and anonymous. Eyes are not immediately round or apparent, hair is dispersed spirally, teeth not at all. The hands are inclined to Egyptianly scroll or flex open communicative, the most expressive of accessories. There is a softish skull, congenitally bubble-like—God-blown for the fun of it—and disproportionately achieved.

  It is a system of contradictions. There are eruptive quakings, disarticulate limbs, and then, conversely, tiny quiet quivers and a suspended repose of mysterious integrity. The first is a flailing executed unharmonious; the second a recovery of almost spherical solidity within which, apparently, completion occurs. Unfinished awake, in sleep it closes off circuits, is sufficient, efficient, a neat functioning whole. (Above whom the Madonna checks to detect breathing.)

  Its repetitions are astounding. Too openly orificed it issues loud, petulant and toothless notes from a face mostly mouth and the deepest of crimsons. Audible everywhere its hullabaloo insubordinate, its emissions unignorable and contrived upon the nerves. Other ended is the site of another recurrence: assiduous, copious, altogether malodorous. An unwarranted largesse jeopardising affections.

  Incarnations of others! Avatars of aunties or the redistribution of a grandfatherly feature familiarly renowned. Generations jostle for rehabilitation: utter newness not so. It is true too what they say about the ubiquity of politicians: every baby figures, alas, in its features at least one. Old age is also oxymoronically there—in the crumpling of a cry, the aspect of perturbation frowningly announced, the contraction to a body full of bodily obligations.

  Perfection is partly in the size of its bundle, exactly rightweight for cuddle, and composed armful-size. So eminently embraceable, so compassed and encompassed, all directions being one. In the snuffle for milk, an arrangement of crescents meet in concise global alignment, well-acquainted and reciprocal. A breath warm, skin confirmed, immediate proximity. There is nothing misplaced in such an arrangement. It has a lover-fit neatness.

  Oh, adoration. Summon myrrh-bringing Magi. After anger and tears, stenches, spills, demon vomits and night alarums, the pause-causing frailty of its life-allotted existence. The body curled upon a future. The face waiting for words, for all the impinging everythings still world-held and brain expected. Listening already. Some cortex corrugation prefixed on transmission. Some compulsory complication. Yet there is nothing so simple: heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat. The responding, unwombed, star-shaped hand.

  At the end of the eighth week the baby was summarily removed to be placed for adoption, and Rose was consigned to the local asylum. It was devastatingly sudden. One day she was there, chattering away over the head of her daughter; the next both were gone, the couple was wrecked and ever-after sundered.

  At our first hospital visit I almost did not recognise my elder sister Rose. Bereftness had been for her a kind of death; she was so reduced in body that I wondered if the nurses were systematically starving her. Her skin had a sere, brittle and yellow appearance that I afterwards learned was the result of electricity, her eyes were very fluid, as if verging on tears, her mind irreproachable. Rose’s fulsome mouth was quiet and at rest; she had ceased to speak, entered a bleak realm of inversion and vacancy, one in which, not only the mouth, but the whole of her body, had taken on an immobile and vaguely totemic aspect.

  I saw my mother smile broadly at her daughter’s silence, nod to a nurse who nearby fussed with a teacup.

  It was at this stage, I think, that the nightmares began. Typically they concerned my mother’s room. I would enter its vegetable, jungle-like shadows, and find her sitting at the dressing-table fingering jewels. Suddenly I would believe myself atrociously electrocuted; my body would blaze for a single instant, my skin would catch fire, wither and become yellow, and at that very moment, the moment in which my own light dispelled the gloom, dead people would appear. The illumined quality of the three planed mirror somehow prismatically conveyed absence to presence, spirit to substance. The most terrible thing was that my sister Rose was numbered among the dead. She, like the others, was extremely thin, and bore an irradiated glow that signified the posthumous. Yet she was not horrific and I would be overcome by a longing to touch and embrace her. At this point the nightmares always concluded the same way. Our mother would intervene to prevent the embrace and Rose would disappear in a spontaneous combustion more complete than my own, a puff! theatrical, leaving nothing more than a spiralling twist of mortuary-grey smoke.

  For almost two years Rose’s condition remained more or less the same. I thought of spells in fairytales, attitudes of suspension which are both long and transitory and require for release the intercession of magic. (I profaned my mother’s room and stole the blue-stoned ring: I turned it and rubbed it, addressed it, prayed to it, held it in the moonlight with invented chants, but all to no avail. I began to fear that any power it possessed was merely material and aesthetic.)

  Then, inexplicably, Rose slowly began to register our Sunday visits. I first noticed the change on a dull morning in winter. As I bent to place the usual perfunctory kiss, my loose hair brushed her cheeks and her eyes lifted to mine. Some recognition or moment of verification occurred. Rose’s nut-brown eyes forgot their long habit of interior orientation, and focused outwards for a second, linked with my own. A blink certified the barely perceptible shift in consciousness and then tears, many tears, gushed and spilled.

  Gradually these signs became more definite and sure, until we looked at each other frankly and wept together heartily. Our mother was ashamed of us. She turned away until the mutual crying had subsided and then, when it was all over and we were publicly recomposed, she would fidget with the teacups, twiddle the teaspoons, and chatter mechanically about nobodies and nothings.

  Rose recovered enough to come home for weekends, and it was this newly sanguine sister—still, my mother insisted, dangerously lunatic—who beckoned from the back shed with a tightly curled finger.

  See the suns, she whispered.

  Come and see the suns!

  I paused for a moment, a little afraid. But then I stepped towards her into the shed’s deep blue shadow, followed her thin back through the narrow framed doorway and saw the suns. The roof of the shed was of second-hand iron so that it bore in zig-zag rows dozens of nail perforations. The sun outside was at some particular angle that made its light divide beautifully and enter each hole; thus the floor of the shed was spotted all over with tiny yellow suns, accidentally counterfeited. Rose moved around the shed in a kind of trance—as though, entering this place, she had arrived at some personal, private interior—watching the little suns slide along her bare arms and slip in splendid speckles down the fabric of her dress.

  Phenomenon mythological! Superabundance of the singular! Stunningly spot-lit at the speed of light. See heavens figure on the palm of my hand. See waves and particles gather in neat circles, the congregation of luminescence, shaft-captured and hole-converged. There are orbs too many to be unremarkable. Division on division in an astronomical propagation.

  So intrinsically comic. The self polka-dotted, patterned over clownish. Repetitiousness rampant and referring indiscreetly to teeny weeny bikinis, twirling bow ties or film-star sequences of sequins. This is the infant happiness of the much too much. This is circus superfluity, exceeding bulb boldness. Flashlight
s! Spangles! Entirely photo-sensitive!

  Oh the mirroring multitudes, so splendidly without the incarceration of planes, no cold glassy capture, no mother-eye control. Optics rampant. Visibility, clarity, the winking sheen of mica. Concaves and convexes fashioned instantaneously by shifting, specularly, the body authoritative. I am the body spot bountiful with seven years’ good luck!

  The decorations of golden. Skin lavished and lit with a coin-precise pigmentation. I am princess bejewelled and wonderfully alchemical. Preciousness settles on the surface of my skin, an elemental simulacrum brilliantly false. No metal quite as bright yet no stringent connoisseur at all unconvinced. A dispersion of luxuriousness ceremonially invested: the slow lowering of crowns, trumpets, cymbals, billions and billions of bold-as-brass buttons.

  Caress upon caress. The slide of suns is fingertip analogous. The lover’s investigative, comprehensive endearments, the foreplaying familiarity, the gift of plenitude. After a hundred tendernesses I am all antique burnish and you an emissary of dazzling shot silk. I am romanticised summer, fleshly, slumbrous, abundant, satiated, the colour of amber or embers, of afternoons oil-perfumed. The complete, breast heavy, glistering, gilt Venus. Confetti both heathen and matrimonial.

  Lights in the eyes. Irises globe daubed. In this is the baby-stare with its consistent mother, its unerroneous, unexpelled spherical reflections. I am the sure satellite of your eyeball surface, the celestial body fluidly shining, the image contained absolutely and with peremptory perfection. Conception. Confirmation. Condensation in rays. Perpetuation in twos and more than twos. Ah, babies!

  I stood there at the doorway listening to my sister rave in a mode I can now only describe as ecstatic. She had not spoken in this way since the time of her pregnancy and motherhood. Her voice had a fast and vaguely breathless quality, as though she were subject to slightly different physical laws or a different atmosphere. She pirouetted in a kind of dance that was also strange: both gypsy and aristocratic, abandoned and repressively measured. I was less taken by the suns—a simple natural occurrence—than by the whole sound-and-light show Rose extravagantly presented. It was not histrionic, but seemed authentic and unpractised, a spontaneous, uncontrived, sudden response. I thought of our mother, closeted in her ugly, nightmarish room with the teak box of jewels and the blue-stoned ring. I thought of the absent baby, my niece, rudely confiscated. I remembered the outlandish size of Rose’s body, her peaky appearance, her relentless talk. I put my hands to my own face—I cannot say why—and remembered most sharply the three planed mirror, the mirror that, finding in its angles extra vectors of light, installed additional impersonations of one who, in any case, was hardly believable in the original version.

  On The Piteous Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

  for Marion Campbell

  Oh wond’rous words, how sweet they are

  According to the meaning which they bring!

  Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

  I

  She arises momentarily from the deepsea of unconsciousness, trawls up her drowned mind through fluid dimensions, through shafts of shadow and light, hanging, suspended, like so many false pendulums, emerges, flailing out of the divisible and brimming darkness, and sensing that, after all, she is somehow still alive, involuntarily praises what she no longer believes in: ‘Thank God!’

  II

  She is about to die, this Mary Wollstonecraft. Born in the year of 1759, she will die at thirty-eight of post-partum complications. She is the controversial and august author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Both famous and feminist in her own uncongenial time. Large-minded. Brave. Of gravity and of substance.

  And now her substantiality has found its irrefragably material expression. She is wrecked in some involuted and private part. She is bloody and broken. Succumbing to the banal republic of the body she has become, in her extremity—and her enemies will note it—Woman Incarnate.

  III

  Memories abound. This is a state of unexpectedly vivid recursion.

  It is 1793, Neuilly, France. In the beautiful forest not far from her cottage she lays down in the low grass with her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Her voluminous dress is lifted to her chest, her lacy petticoats flung back in white frothy folds from exposed long drawers and woollen stockings; and now, in the absence of both England and whalebone constraints, she feels entirely fulsome and deliciously wanton. Her garments surround her like exploded petals. She thinks herself Romantic: the lush concavities of the Crimson Rose.

  Birch trees filter the shifting sunlight. There is a profound scent of musk and the skitterings of tiny, invisible animals. Leaves, rocking slightly, descend in a series of slow, gust-impelled and noiseless floatations. The breeze is gentle and the ambience illicit.

  Mary Wollstonecraft, famous Woman, feels Gilbert Imlay’s hand explore with male confidence the various entrances and recesses of her hypocritically modest and well-tied undergarments. Starched cotton and ribbon bows gratefully give way. His touch is soft and his fingers intrepid.

  Mary sees Gilbert’s face rock rhythmically above her (eyes closed, brow furrowed, a look resembling consternation), and hears him, in sexual distraction, murmur very quietly (using his comic American accent, his low bass tones), she hears him murmur, most distinctly the words ‘My God!’ His tone is one of pathetic pleasure and Mary supposes, knowing his atheism, that she has been casually deified in the act of sexual congress, that she is not Woman, nor Rose, but Numinous Entity. She smiles to herself. Then she trails her left hand down the body of her lover until, with an audacity purely human, she cups his swaying testicles in the palm of her hand.

  IV

  The baby. There is a baby from this most recent, still painful wrenching. In moments of lucidity they bring it near, cradling the cocoon-shaped parcel close to her monogrammed pillow.

  ‘Your daughter’, they say. ‘Your most delicate daughter.’

  Mary Wollstonecraft gazes over at the ‘William’ she had expected, and sees a bluish coloured female with her own immature face. It is impossibly sedate and well composed. When it opens its eyes, on rare occasions, it has a glazed and inward look, focusless, self-concerned and almost solipsistic. Regarding the eyes of her baby, Mary feels superfluous. In its swivelling mirrors she is watery and inhuman.

  ‘Mary’, says the midwife, kind Mrs Blenkinsop. ‘He has called her Mary.’

  From under the mummifying weight and bondage of the bedclothes, tearful Mary Wollstonecraft, now newly eponymous, regards her baby once more.

  ‘A daughter’, she whispers. ‘Once more a daughter.’

  Mrs Blenkinsop notices the ambivalence in her mistress’s voice. Mrs Blenkinsop fails to notice, however, that here are evident the symptoms of another subsidence, that Mary Wollstonecraft is busy sliding back into her own body, a body in which, at this very moment, some torment of the womb, some organic agitation, tricks her into thinking that she has not yet delivered, that the sexless baby—its incipient life ready, its blue face furious—still butts rudely against her innards, and that the neat cocoon held nearby is but a fraudulent figment.

  V

  There is a bewhiskered gentleman who comes and goes and it is William Godwin, Jacobin husband of five short months of our suffering Mary. She looks directly at his face and summons her own voice to announce in measured sentences that she is doing splendidly, thank you, and that the worst is surely over. He leans above her and descends slowly for a well placed kiss. Mary knows her kissed forehead to be a site of conflagration and spotted with sweat. She imagines herself repulsive.

  At first William’s face did not appeal. She preferred the other William, the poet and illustrator Blake, or better still his artist companion Henry Fuseli (who was unwisely married). Mary moved among companies of talkative men, disturbed and aroused by passions that were—and how well she knew it—both carnal and intellectual.

  This was the scene: Gilbert Imlay was away doing
business in Scandinavia and Mary, masquerading for the sake of social acceptance as righteous Mrs Imlay, was in London with their daughter, the French-conceived Fanny. Mary attended dinner parties with the independence of a man. She sat at a table around which mostly eminent couples were disposed, and felt at once wonderfully singular and sadly deserted. William Godwin and Tom Paine were debating Voltaire over minute glasses of sherry. The shibboleth ‘Rousseau’ echoed throughout the room. Heresies abounded. Heterodoxies and liberalisms everywhere emerged. Humanist dissent rose high into air coloured amber and rendered seductive by lit candelabra. The women at the table were mostly quiet (picking away at morsels of sweet eats, their eyes downcast, apparently observing their own marmoreal bosoms), but Mary Wollstonecraft, alias Imlay, felt compelled to loudly pronounce on the Perfectibility of Man and the Exemplary Necessity of Justice and Reason. Her own voice interceded and made itself known. Male faces turned. Kind William Blake, conspicuously wearing the bonnet rouge of the French revolutionists, smiled broadly and lifted his glass at the other end of the table. The women were disquieted. William Godwin raised an eyebrow and begged Mrs Mary Imlay to continue, if she would, her remarkable disquisition within which, with rare conviction, she extended the fine principles of Reason and Equality even to the remote and insular sphere of Womankind …

  His face moves away. She can see that he is shocked by some deterioration in her condition. Her sweat appears glistening on the surface of his lips.

  ‘Mrs Godwin, my love’, he murmurs miserably. And then he presses her hand, turns and leaves.

  VI

  They have placed the baby upon her but no milk is forthcoming. Blue that it is, tiny and palpitating, it seems unable to suckle. Mrs Blenkinsop dutifully pummels at her mistress’s nipples, fiddles assiduously with the baby’s minute mouth, and rearranges their collusion.